Layout 3 - India Foundation for the Arts - IFA

56
ArtConnect: The IFA Magazine, Volume 6, Number 1
jatipuranas of the various communities
that populate this subcontinent. They
serve not only as tools of selfinterpretation
but also as vehicles of
culture-specific worldviews and
thought. In a society composed of
living communities, the local epics
endorse the belief of each
community that it is unique and
surrounded by lesser mortals.
However, each community also
knows that other communities, too,
have their private ‘histories’ or
jatipuranas, in which others do not
fare well either. And they have learnt
to live with that. This is also a part
of what I have called an epic culture
and a marker of another culture of
cosmopolitanism. In this culture, the
good and the evil, the gods and the
demons, coexist; they are both
necessary for the completion of the
story.
The readers and listeners of
the puranas participate in that
worldview and even intervene in it.
Every kathakar has his or her
distinctive recital of a purana. No
scholar can lay down the rule of how a
character or an event should be
interpreted by a person or a
community. Hence there are temples
in Himachal Pradesh dedicated to
unlikely gods drawn from the
Mahabharata, such as the evil king
Duryodhana and his friend and ally
Karna, the disowned eldest brother of
the Pandavas; there are tens of
thousands of devotees of Ravana, the
ultimate demon or Brahmarakshasa,
in North Bengal, and there is a temple
of Ravana’s more benign brother,
Vibhishana, in Sri Lanka. No demon
is entirely ungodly, no god fully godlike.
A. Sashikanth’s film 1
Kelai
Draupadi beautifully captures the
extent of the ‘play’ that might be
available in a purana. If Michael
Madhusudan Dutt reaffirmed that
even gods were not immune to
‘demonisation’, Sashikanth’s modest
documentary reaffirms that, even
today, no epic character is immune to
deification either.
Every kathakar has his or her distinctive recital of a
purana. No scholar can lay down the rule of how a
character or an event should be interpreted by a
person or a community.